I've been trying to understand gestures for a while now. What's a gesture... weeeell, in a way you could call a pose a gesture. Such as in gesture-drawing, it's only one drawing as a gesture, as an idea, you're trying to capture the essence of that gesture in one pose. But what I'm more interested at the moment is gestures as small bits of action that give detail to an animation. You could also see pose to pose animation as gesture to gesture animation, because it can very well be that, in fact. When I was animating Cousteau a year ago I used to try to simplify his animation and have round, simple movement that doesn't 'bounce' much, I was obsessed with the idea of using soft accents mostly, meaning... instead of hitting hard accents, just keep the movement going forward, and not 'bounce'. The result was lacking real detail though, and I was disappointed. I already wrote some on this lovely matter... here. After a while I realized, in my infinite wisdom (hehehe), that in fact I shouldn't try so hard to remove hard accents from my animation, and I should focus more on the details, and keep a balance of soft versus hard accents, simple vs complicated, etc, based on the context. Which is hard, of course, and I have 100 more years to learn about that, and after 100 years I will know everything. :D Yeah. I still think there is a strange beauty in simple animation with mostly soft accents, and I want to get to know more about that style... while not being so careless with gestures and details.
Anyway, a gesture can be a small elbow movement, or finger movement, or a shoulder hunch... for example, the head usually does a lot of things, animating the head on a simple path with very clean animation that lacks detail, I think in most cases will look lifeless. But add gestures to that movement and all of a sudden it could become alive! I think we can see these gestures as small and large, or maybe small, medium and large... large gestures should probably be planned more carefully and described with extremes and breakdowns, in pose to pose animation, because a large gesture can very well affect the entire body. In fact, I think most gestures affect, even if very subtly, more or less, the entire body. You may think a smaller head gesture might not affect the legs, but I'd say... it often does. Because it's not just a head gesture, it's a... gesture. So it starts with the head... it has a very visible effect on the chest, but it might also subtly affect the hips and limbs. Depends, if it's a really small and especially slow gesture, it can have a smaller area of influence. Small gestures could be added as a layer of detail on top of an initial, cleaner, simpler animation. So... the difficulty is to keep the base animation layer clean, and free of unwanted accents, or jerks. And then add those accents where they're needed. I used to be so afraid of accents... because if they occur at the wrong time and place, the seriously mess up things. But it took me a while to realize that, in fact, accents are good, and necessary, just... when they're placed right, when they're motivated and correct/accurate. Also, it's easy to control the larger ones, but hard to control the subtle accents. Because any contrast, even a small one, will create an accent.
For example, if you animate a stretch, and only try to capture that movement through posing , good timing, and clean paths of action... it will probably lack the tension that would add believability to the stretch. Add some subtle jerkiness where it's needed, where the tension should be, and wow!
I think I should write a post about tension vs relaxation... this is another something I've started thinking about fairly recently.
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
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